how much trouble is changing a speedo bulb?

well?

 

oops i forgot. 1982 750 seca

 

It's pretty hard on my wife's trailblazer but my Astro van is easy....

I have one of those little "ratchet-wrench type" srew drivers that allows me to access the screw on the back side of the housing so that I dont have to remove the bolts holding the whole cluster in. The little wrench works well because you have roughly 1 inch to work in.

Once the rear cover is off replace your speedo bulbs with Led's and never worry about them again plus have the side benefit of reduced amp draw

 

Thing is, Rob, you have to take the cover off before you can get to the bolts that hold the cluster to its mountings anyway.

Basically, the easiest thing is to remove the two side bolts for the headlight so you can get that out of the way. Then you can remove the four Philips screws that hold the bottom cover on the cluster. From there it's easy: just pull out the little rubber socket that holds the lamp and swap the bulb out.

Probably a 1/2 hour job.

I agree about changing to LED's, but make sure you get the right ones. You'll probably need to order them from superbrightleds.com or some such. Most chain auto stores don't carry white 194 LED's, and those that do don't carry ones that are bright enough for back lighting.

The Autozone ambers are bright enough for turn signal indicators. I used the five LED warm white 194's from superbrightleds.com for my backlights. I also used some of their brighter LED bulbs for the other indicator lamps, which actually turned out to be mostly too bright... especially the green and blue which are nearly blinding (had to put tape over the bulbs to dim them down a bit).

Which bulb do you need to replace?

Cheers,
Paul

 

speedo but should do tac

 

If you are taking the cluster off, you might as well replace them all (this is if you stick with the incandescent bulbs, LED's cost quite a bit more and this might not be fiscally feasible). This would save you popping back in there for quite a while.

 

If you order them online, the LED's aren't too expensive... and regular 194's actually are kind of expensive from local parts stores.

From superbrightleds.com, the warm white 5 LED backlight LEDs are about $4 a piece, and the indicator LED's are about 79 cents each (if you go with the dimmest ones, which I'd recommend, as the brighter ones are too bright).

 

"go with the dimmest ones"

i am thinking of going with blue.

 

Ya my green and blue are quite blinding, even in the day. I had to stick a piece of electrical tape over my high beam lens cause i couldn't see the road from it at night

I'll fix it right next time the gauges are apart and stick some tape over the actual LED for the high beam, and remove the electrical tape from the outter lens.